Pepsi Marketers Faced Rebuffs
In the Field, at the Home Office

By

Stephanie Capparell Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

Updated Sept. 5, 1997 12:02 a.m. ET

E DWARD F. BOYD had a front-row seat in the grand ballroom of New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where Pepsi had convened a national bottlers conference in 1949. Walter S. Mack, then president of Pepsi, was at the podium, speaking about the company's effort to give Pepsi a classier image for the Fifties. "We don't want to be known as the nigger drink," he said.